jrichardshaw

The author does indeed do that via their definition of the volume equivalent sphere radius r_s.

The same happened to the Toronto Public Library around the same time, probably coincidence rather than connected. It has made me reflect on the breadth of non-traditional public services provided by libraries. I noticed because I was looking for practice questions for the Canadian citizenship test, and one of two non-profit sets is from the TPL (the other is from Richmond Public Library), and now it's no longer available anywhere.

It's not clear to me whether moving this role to the lowest level of government is a good idea or not: citizenship is one of the key responsibilities of the federal government, but it probably is better facilitated via new immigrant welcoming programmes which are usually community based. However, it seems pretty clear that if that is being done then we need to provide the resources to do so properly.

Also libraries are great.

I'd definitely like to second how great peewee is. It's been a core part of running our telescope for the last 8 years. It strikes a nice balance between power and simplicity, a significant set of useful extensions and great documentation.

Sometimes I find it impossible to believe that @coleifer is just one person. Peewee has 2300 issues and 500 PR's none of which are open and outstanding, and almost all of which he has personally responded too in a genuinely helpful way. He pipes up on Stackoverflow for peewee questions too.

I imagine you'll kick yourself for not figuring this one out.

It means homepage (constructed from hejmo = home, and pago = page)

I have bursts of progress trying to learn Esperanto, also with Duolingo. I guess the unfortunate aspect of Esperanto is that you don't meet a lot of other learners in real life so it's a bit of a solo endeavour.

I give a lot of credit to whoever put together the Duolingo course, there's a lot of amusing innuendo with Adamo kaj Sofia and apt sentences like "Li trinkas bieron, cxar li estas malfelicxa".

Actual research astronomer here, and as a (radio) astronomer I would love to get rid of leap seconds. Assuming that UTC = UT1 (the time measure based on Earth rotation) is not accurate enough for most calculation such that you already need to use UT1 tables/forecasts and leap second tables in your ephemeris calculations so there isn't really much benefit in trying to keep UTC close to UT1. And the reality is that for us they actually make things worse: we stop data acquisition at the telescope over the leap second period because we timestamp our data in UTC dealing with the changing interval would be a pain.

There are some good arguments for keeping leap seconds, but I don't think research astronomy is really one (it might be more useful for amateurs), particularly on ~100 year timescales where you don't expect things to slip that much. I think this sentiment is shared by most of my peers, particularly those who actually have to implement data acquisition and analysis pipelines!

That's a great description.

Sounds like you moved from one nice system to another!

I pretty much moved over to a 12.9" iPad Pro + Pencil when they first came out. It replaced my "system" of doing derivations on the blank side of the leftover cover pages from the department printer. They were then "filed" into a giant pile in the corner of my desk.

Some part of the chaos of this system was deliberate - unbound sheets that you only write on one side of are great for derivations as you can lay out many of them on a desk to see what you wrote a few pages ago. Still the iPad is a vast improvement for me, even if you can't see everything at once.

Also I don't think the iPad Pro would improve things for you, it's great if you're used to the wonderful Bic Cristal, but you definitely won't get the precision of a super fine pen, though maybe the newer generation is better on that front.

I'd like to add a bit of love for the timeless classic, the Bic Cristal. Reliable and consistent, and sufficiently cheap you can have them scattered all over home and office so there's one nearby when you need it. Apparently ~5 billion are sold each year.

Thinking about it now makes me a little sad that I've switched entirely onto an iPad instead of paper and pen.

Thanks, that's good to hear! I'll give it another look next time I look at switching things up.

I've tried to use Zotero over the years, and I always stumble with it because it didn't have a good handling of arXiv id's. The arXiv is one of the primary way of finding papers in my field (cosmology), and I really want to support ingestion via them, looking up actual paper details from them (while retaining the arXiv id), and including them in bibtex exports. I check back from time to time, but I don't think that's massively improved, but I would be very happy if anyone else knows otherwise.

Although it's gotten a little maligned here, I've actually switched to Readcube Papers recently, it supports everything I list above, and has been pretty good for everything else. It's a closed source and subscription which isn't ideal, but in the end I'm willing to pay for something that supports my workflow. I do worry a little about getting locked in, but ultimately, provided I'm willing to ditch any annotations, I think I can just export everything as bibtex and import to something else.

The GP is making a completely legitimate point here that broad sharing of large raw datasets is pretty hard, but I don't think anyone is arguing we should give up. Here's a few thoughts, though they're more directed at the general thread than the parent.

In my case I'm currently finishing up a paper where the raw data it's derived from comes to 1.5 PB. It is not impossible to share that, but it costs time and money (which academia is rarely flush with), and even if it was easy at our end, very few groups that could reproduce it have the spare capacity to ingest that. We do plan to publicly release it, but those plans have a lot of questions.

Alternatively we could try to share summary statistics (as suggested by a post above), but then we need to figure out at what level is appropriate. In our case we have a relevant summary statistic of our data that comes to about 1 TB that is now far easier to share (1 TB really isn't a problem these days, though you're not embedding it in a notebook). But a large amount of data processing was applied to produce that, and if I give you that summary I'm implicitly telling you to trust me that what we did at that stage was exactly what we said we'd done and was done correctly. Is that reproducibility?

You could also argue this the other way. What we've called "raw data" is just the first thing we're able to archive, but our acquisition system that generates it is a large pile of FPGAs and GPUs running 50k lines of custom C++. Without the input voltage streams you could never reproduce exactly what it did, so do you trust that? Then you're into the realm of is our test suite correct, and does it have good enough coverage?

I think we have a pretty good handle on one aspect of this, is our analysis internally reproducible? i.e. with access to the raw data can I reproduce everything you see in the paper? That's a mixture of systems (e.g. configs and git repo hashes being automatically embedded into output files), and culture (e.g. making sure no one things it's a good idea to insert some derived data into our analysis pipeline that doesn't have that description embedded; data naming and versioning).

But the external reproducibility question is still challenging, and I think it's better to think about it as being more of a spectrum with some optimal point balancing practicality and how much an external person could reasonably reproduce. Probably with some weighting for how likely is it that someone will actually want to attempt a reproduction from that level. This seems like the question that could do with useful debate in the field.

Cylinders are great in a sense. As you say the efficiency is awesome, but the standing waves make life complicated!

The GPU boom is causing big issues. Future projects are targeted at where we think GPUs will be in a few years, but you can never predict the crypto induced demand, and at the moment the price and availability is causing issues.

We already do make a quick full sky image, but unfortunately it’s not public. It’s actually a way easier problem than it is for MWA. Our antennas are on a regular grid, so it’s just a dense 1D FFT in each direction and we’re done. As the CHIME FoV is so narrow we tend to actually show just one column along the meridian against time, and that produces a lovely quick map of the sky.

The FRB boom has definitely helped the funding for everyone, and it’s been very successful for CHIME. Next stop, real time localization!